Office hours

To the office early, primarily for a change of scenery because I was feeling like I was in quite the rut at home. Still a bit of post partem energy lingering after the film, I suspect. The work is such an incredible high! The end of the work is such an incredible letdown! There is no solution. Or at least I haven't found one in over half a century of repeating the same goddamn dance. It's worse when I don't immediately jump to a new project, the serial monogamist. But I still tell myself I am taking a break until the first of the year -- though, in fact, maybe I am one of those folks incapable of taking a break. Maybe I'll have to make up some "place taking" project to fool myself into thinking I have something to do. Or maybe I can become obsessive about banjo and piano practice. Actually this would do me good!

Money and awards are great distractions in the "having written" phase but I don't expect either any more. You have to market something first ha ha and I have retired into the anonymity of my archive. No regrets. Awards are silly for the most part, if necessary at the beginning of a career, or at least useful then, but the only awards worth getting, really, are the ones you don't apply for. I've gotten a couple of those. They come as surprises. The others you apply for don't and if you don't get them, they become disappointments. Yes, the awards you don't apply for can be nice.

The best one I ever received was an award totally made up by a charming old woman who loved my plays. She wanted to give me money -- a true patron! -- but she wanted tax advantages in doing so. So she made up the Oregon Foundation Theatre Award and gave me a five grand check! And I became the one and only recipient of an award that was created so she could give me money with tax advantages. Love it. Even had a public presentation after a performance of one of my plays, a newspaper item, etc, but no investigative reporter caught the whiff and the next year no one remembered that it existed and no one was getting it THIS year. I guess she's really the one and only true patron I've ever had -- and what a rare thing, too, because patrons don't exist much any more.